There are three cinematic masters in today’s reigning generation of directors, who each rarely ever fail to produce masterpiece after masterpiece. Along with Quentin Tarantino and Christopher Nolan, Wes Anderson is one of those elite few who seem to just churn out brilliance without having to even try.

When the idiosyncratic director of Rushmore tackled stop-motion animation with 2009’s Fantastic Mr. Fox, he found his truest calling. In the wake of his Oscar-nominated Moonrise Kingdom and The Grand Budapest Hotel, Anderson has now returned to the same arena of animation and it’s a masterpiece even when stacked against his best.

I hate hyperbolizing in my reviews. Not only did I spend my teens paying for a childhood of calling each movie I saw “the best ever,” but words like ‘masterpiece’ and ‘classic’ can lose their power very easily with overuse.

Last year, though, I told people Dunkirk was quite probably the tensest movie I’d ever seen. I’d never outright said that about a movie I’d seen before, as no movie had impacted me like Dunkirk. Now a second movie has.

Many lists that are predominantly populated by modern movies feel slanted to younger writers/readers who may not have an exposure to films older than they are or a contextual understanding of their importance.

The superhero movie is a unique beast, though. A few genres and sub-genres, like sci-fi, have been greatly helped by the advance of CGI over the last quarter-century. Sci-fi was still capable of brilliance with just ideas alone, though; superhero movies lend themselves so closely to goofiness, parody, or sublime farce that the modern age of computer effects has served largely to legitimize a type of film that often wasn’t taken very seriously before the new millennium, even when they starred icons like Superman or Batman.

Each Monday or Tuesday, I’ll have a bite-size “Best Of,” related to whatever’s coming out that week. But, unlike other in-depth rankings of mine, I’ll be giving no justification for the order, defence of controversial choices, or rambling description of each entry.

Today, I try a new weekly feature on The Apple Box. Each Monday or Tuesday, I’ll have a bite-size “Best Of,” related to whatever’s coming out that week. But, unlike other in-depth rankings of mine, I will be giving no justification for the order, defence of controversial choices, or rambling description of each entry.

Truly, that should be enough. If any living filmmaker has earned the assumption that every movie of theirs will be, at the very worst, worth seeing — and at the very best, a masterpiece like E.T. or Raiders of the Lost Ark — it’s Sir Stevie. And sure enough, Ready Player One is, at the very least, worth seeing. More than that, it’s the most fun movie of 2018 so far.

You know how once a plane’s going fast enough, it naturally wants to lift off the ground? Tomb Raider is a plane that’s constantly trying to take off, but no matter how fast it keeps speeding, director Roar Uthaug is intent on grounding it.